Attack of the Theater People
Contents
For Floyd,
Because no one laughs louder
One
If you think about it
(which I try not to), the very term is absurd:
acting school
. Like Juilliard were some kind of substitute filling in for the real thing, as in “acting president” or “acting chairman.”
At least, that’s what I tell myself as I pace around the fountain at Lincoln Center, my heart throbbing like Vesuvius about to blow. The May sky may be as blue as Frank Sinatra’s eyes, but I’m equipped with my own personal rain cloud. Dread has its own ecosystem.
I look at the genuine fake Swatch I bought on the street—3:21 EST (Edward Standard Time)—which means it’s 3:10, because I set it eleven minutes fast. I don’t know why I bother, because I automatically make the necessary eleven-minute adjustment, which means I’m still always late, plus have to do math.
Adhering to the Italian-Catholic tradition of optional piety, I make a silent prayer to the patron saint of lost causes, whose name escapes me, take one last gulp of spring air, then stalk around the corner with the grim, determined footfall of a condemned man hoping for a reprieve. As I pass through the glass doors leading into the finest drama school in the country, I glance at my reflection, only to see a pallid, hollow-eyed stranger, a faded copy of the Technicolor person I used to be. His face has the haggard, undernourished look of someone who has subsisted solely on a diet of criticism and sheer panic.
That’s what two years in acting school can do to you.
As I turn away from the ghost in the glass, I console myself with the knowledge that, unlike my life, at least my hair is under control. Years from now, if anyone asks me which technological advance of the mid-1980s most impacted my life, I won’t say personal computers or videocassette recorders. No, I will extol the miraculous properties of Beautonics
®
Ready-Set-Go Spray Mousse.
Straight-haired people living in dry environments have no idea of the immense challenges facing curly-haired residents of the New York tristate area. Forget the cat-sized super rats that stalk the sewers and have been known to creep into tenements and carry off infants. Disregard the legions of shaggy mental patients the Reagan administration has unleashed onto the city streets. No, for curly, coarse-haired Mediterraneans like myself, nothing compares to the indignity of having steamy, urban humidity transform your head into a privet hedge.
But then, this past New Year’s Eve, while getting ready to ring in 1986, my roommate Paula sprayed a handful of foam into my palm and, with one swoop across my scalp, ended twenty Bad Hair years.
I take a disproportionate amount of solace in the fact that, no matter how muggy it is outside (or inside my personal ecosystem), no matter what occurs, even if the unthinkable, the unmentionable, happens today, my hair will remain rigid, steadfast, and true.
But I still must wait to learn my fate. Even at 3:47 EST, the door to Marian Seldes’s classroom is closed, which means that the grande dame of the Juilliard drama department hasn’t finished with Willow.
Willow.
From the moment I heard her name—Willow Branch—I knew I wanted to be her friend. What kind of parents name their kid Willow Branch? (Hippie parents, as it turned out.) She asked obtuse questions during orientation, always in sentence fragments you had to piece together like a puzzle: “Is Juilliard doing anything—because Manhattan was stolen from the Native American people—well, they paid, but not a fair price—and Lincoln Center is funded by the city—at least, I assume it is—so don’t you think we should be doing something to compensate the native people?” Everyone else rolled their eyes, the faculty included, but I found her fascinating. Willow has an ethereal, Ophelia’s-mad-scene quality about her, like she’s listening to music no one else hears.
We met in the cafeteria. She was seated alone at the next table, moving a saltshaker along a subway map. I didn’t realize she was talking to me because she just sighed and said, “I feel sorry for Fiftieth Street.”
I looked up from my copy of
Much Ado About Nothing
to see her freckled face peering at me, her skin like a speckled egg, her frizzy ginger hair growing every which way, as if it couldn’t be bothered to coordinate the effort.
“Excuse me?”
“The Fiftieth Street station,” she said. “It has no identity. It makes me—well, just look—Fifty-ninth Street is Columbus Circle and Sixty-sixth is Lincoln Center. Then, to the south, there’s Forty-second Street, Times Square, and Thirty-fourth Street, Penn Station. But Fiftieth—nothing. Just a number. It’s the neglected middle child of the Seventh Avenue line.” She looked at me, her eyes glassy and fragile, as if this mattered a great deal. “What would you name it?”
“I don’t know. Gershwin Theater? Circle in the Square?”
She frowned. “I’d like to name it Nowhere. That way, when you got off, you could say you went Nowhere:
‘Where ya’ goin’?’ ‘Nowhere.’
”
“The existential subway station.”
Willow clutched her hand to her chest. “Oh! That’s so—it makes me—you have no idea.” She advanced on me, her hands flying a few inches away from my body, as if she were molding me in clay. “I just love that you used the word
existential
in a sentence,” she said, practically crying. “Let’s be friends.”
We have been ever since. Hanging out with Willow makes me feel grown-up and responsible because she’s apt to do things like lose her shoes at a party or try to hug a police horse.
The door to the studio swings open and out she wafts with the vague, contented expression of Blanche DuBois after a couple of spiked lemon Cokes and a nooner with the delivery boy. Unlike me, Willow’s not in any danger. She has no trouble being “publicly private” or “emotionally transparent” in acting class. All she has to worry about is not taking the wrong subway and ending up in the Bronx.
Behind her I see the whippet-thin silhouette of Marian Seldes, her regal profile like something you’d find on an Etruscan coin. She turns and extends an oh-so-graceful arm.
“Ah, my little bird, come in.”
Seldes calls all of us her little birds, with great affection, but I can’t help wondering whether it’s her way of protecting herself emotionally. Much in the way farmers don’t name the animals they’re going to slaughter, or the Pilgrims didn’t name their children until they survived infancy, perhaps Seldes doesn’t address us individually until she’s certain we’re going to last.
After a semester on probation, today’s the day I find out. Probation. As if bad acting were a crime. I pass Willow, who crosses her fingers, then her eyes, which makes me smile. I love it when beautiful women cross their eyes. It’s subversive.
Marian Seldes gestures to a chair, a Park Avenue hostess inviting me to tea. “Do sit down, Edmund.”
“Edward.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. We were just discussing
Long Day’s Journey into Night
.”
Undoubtedly imagining Willow’s future triumph as the dazed morphine addict Mary Tyrone.
I smooth my dingy black jeans, which I washed in the tub with shampoo because I can’t afford the Laundromat, then pull my navy blue T-shirt away from my belly. It’s the same shirt I wore when I played Jesus in my high school production of
Godspell
, but I’ve turned it inside out to hide the Superman decal, which now sticks to my chest. I don’t really like wearing black and blue together, as if I were a bruise, but there’s an unspoken competition in the drama department to see who can look the most ragged. Mention that you only slept four hours last night and someone will nod and say they only slept three. Back in high school I treated every day as a costume drama; but anyone who spiffs themselves up here isn’t taken seriously.
And I seriously need to be taken seriously.
Marian Seldes folds one attenuated leg over another like a cricket about to commence a solo. “Dirge for a Drama Student.”
“Tell me, my little bird,” she murmurs, “how do you feel you’re doing in your studies?”
Truthfully? For two years, I’ve been lost in a Freudian bog without a map. Improvising as ourselves, without a character to hide behind, is supposed to free us from self-consciousness and fear, but the exercises only make me more self-conscious and fearful: three minutes alone in your room waking up; three minutes alone in your room getting dressed; three minutes alone in your room reading a letter.
In the words of Sally Bowles, “What good is sitting alone in your room?”
Acting class doesn’t feel anything like doing a show. No backstage buzz. No spotlight. No applause. What’s more, we’re never supposed to penetrate the invisible “fourth wall” between us and the audience, never “perform.” I feel like someone’s cut off my arms and legs.
The actors who succeed here are the ones who are emotionally available, like Willow. Press a button and out come tears. I don’t know how she does it. She’s a human spigot. I’m more like Morales in
A Chorus Line
. I dig right down to the bottom of my soul and I feel nothing.
How am I doing?
“Okay.”
Marian Seldes fixes her eagle eyes on me, radiating the same steely resolve that landed her in
The Guinness Book of World Records
for performing five years on Broadway in
Deathtrap
without missing a performance—all while teaching. Her cheekbones are like bookshelves, above which sit eyes that speak volumes. “Just…okay?”
I look around the windowless room, with its gray linoleum floor and acoustic tile ceiling, desperately hoping I might be inspired by the brilliant ghosts who once studied here: Kevin Kline, Robin Williams, William Hurt. In the hermetically sealed world of Juilliard you are literally breathing the same air as the stars.
I’ve got to say something, preferably true. But what? After having every move I make, every word I say vivisected, analyzed, and criticized in front of everyone, I don’t know what to do anymore. Learning to act is like getting buried in the sand up to your neck, then having an Australian soccer team play footy with your head.
Marian Seldes sighs.
“Edward, when you first auditioned for us you laid yourself bare, exposing the fishy white underbelly of your soul.”
Actually, I forgot my lines, had a total meltdown, and ended up incorporating the words
goddamned fucking ass-wipe shit-for-brains pussy-whipped toad
into Sophocles’
Antigone
. This somehow got mistaken for talent.
Marian Seldes continues. “But ever since then, you’ve been concealing something. Instead of truth, you’re always giving us a
performance
.” She splays her quill-like fingers in a Fosse-esque manner, but the effect’s all wrong.
Lady Macbeth! The Musical.
She purses her mouth. “I’m afraid you’re simply too…what’s the expression…‘jazz hands’ for Juilliard.”
No. This can’t be happening. I worked too hard to get here to be rejected. I sued my own father to make this dream come true, and that was after I tried to raise the money myself through embezzlement, blackmail, money laundering, identity theft, fraud, forgery, and (just a little) prostitution. “I’m sure I’ve got it in me,” I say. “If I just tried harder…”
She places her hands to her breastbone, as if to quell the emotion burbling inside her. “Oh, my little bird, you’re so young,” she says, which is true. At least half of my classmates came to Juilliard after completing a bachelor’s elsewhere. The drama division doesn’t offer a master’s, so we’re all together, and the gulf between those in their mid-twenties and those of us who can’t drink legally is vast. “What you need,” she says, “is life experience. You need to get out into the world and discover Who. You. Are.” She rises, gesturing to some unseen horizon. “Hop a freight train. Work on a fishing boat. Have a love affair and get your heart broken.” She’s all elbows and flying hands as she speaks, her fingers manipulating invisible marionettes.
“And then what?”
“Who knows?” Her eyes light with excitement, as if she and I were going off together. “That’s the point.”
“But I want to finish school.”
“And you should. Listen, Edmund—”
“Edward.”
“Of course. I’m so sorry. I keep thinking of Eugene O’Neill. He was expelled from college, too, you know.”
The word
expelled
slams me in the chest.
“But then he went off and had
adventures
,” she says, shaking a fist to screw my courage to the sticking place. “And that led him to become the first great American playwright.”
“But,” I hear a small voice say, “I want to be an actor.”
It’s all I’ve ever wanted.
Marian Seldes folds herself onto the chair again. “Here’s what we’ll do,” she says in a soothing bedtime voice. “In a year’s time, if you like, you can reaudition. Of course, there’s no guarantee you’ll get readmitted, but we’d certainly consider you again. How’s that?”
I nod, unable to speak. Unable to feel.
“Now,
fly
, little bird,” she says, tossing her arms like she’s releasing a carrier pigeon. “Fly, and be
free
!”
It’s an exit line. Except I’m the one who exits.